Mako’s latest post on revealing errors tells of a speed trap camera that automatically mails tickets to owners of speeding cars. In this case, though, the car in question was being towed, a fact that would have been obvious to any human observer. The story illustrates the dangers of using automated systems to detect violations of law. Because these systems lack effective human oversight, people are accused of breaking the law by computers that lack the ability to see the exculpatory context.
And this isn’t a one-off design flaw. Using automated systems to do wholesale prosecution is exactly how the RIAA goes from this to this and this and this. Even if they “win” some of those cases, I’m sure they wish they’d never brought them. And if they hadn’t traded their lawyers for robots, they never would have.
In the real world, police and prosecutors can’t help but exercise discretion with every decision they make. And while it’s true there is rampant abuse of the power to decide when to drop the legal hammer on some schlub’s life, that discretion is the humanity in our justice system. People are messy and inconsistent, but only human judgments yield human justice.
I just posted a link to this post over at Revealing Errors as a comment. I point out there that this post says everything I should have said in my original post and didn’t. Thank you!
“Only human judgments yield human justice,” is an eloquent slogan that I fear we’ll have far too much need for it in the future.
The drive toward economic efficiency slowly kills processes that don’t adapt. It’s hard to make humans more efficient– we’re not upgradable. The only way to make people more efficient is to transition them from doing tasks to supervising robots that do tasks.
So, yeah, it’s a slogan we’re going to need. But hopefully not for long. How hard would it be to hire somebody reliable to look at speed trap photos? Or to do some digging so the RIAA stops suing dead people? Surely the efficiency gain in using automated systems frees up enough resources to adequately supervise those systems. We just need to learn the lesson that even the smartest systems are really really stupid.
More lawsuits that show why the RIAA should fire their robot lawyers: here and here. Thanks to Tim.